Deep scars, painful memories

Wartime tortures its victims long beyond the battlefields
and combat. Especially when a war tears apart the population of a single
nation, the scars run deep, last long and profoundly change lives.
That’s the circumstance of the characters in Martín Zimmerman’s Seven Spots on the Sun, receiving its world premiere at the Cincinnati Playhouse.

Back in 2006, Lewis Black told CityBeat
in an interview that the Bush administration and the GOP were “fucking
out of their minds.” So it is fortuitous that a recent interview took
place on the second day of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster to protest
the Affordable Care Act.

Musical based on film has more flash than heart

Producers of musical theater are always on the prowl
for material that already has some emotional traction and romantic
tales that were films when today’s audiences were young and in love are
ripe for conversion into theatrical works. It’s possible to do this with
some success, but I’m afraid that the folks who’ve translated the film
into Ghost: The Musical didn’t have enough faith in the story.

It takes a brave theater company to stage Carrie: The Musical. Since 1988 when it
lasted for just five nights on Broadway and lost its $8 million investment,
it’s been ridiculed nearly as much as its beleaguered central character.

New play chronicles the life and legacy of Syd Nathan and King Records

Earlier this year, dozens of volunteers
roamed Cincinnati, haunting record stores, clubs and coffee shops. The
group was seeking stories about King Records, the legendary record label
that made its home here in the Queen City.

Tom Arnold totally understands if you
were once in the camp that presumed that if you were involved with
someone talented, you couldn’t possibly be talented yourself.
“A lot of people thought that,” Arnold
says of his days working with friend, later spouse and later ex,
Roseanne Barr. “First of all, I don’t care."

The Broadway revival of Chicago, the satirical show about
murder, celebrity and corruption, is the longest-running American musical in
Broadway history; the 2002 film of Chicago
won the Academy Award. All the more reason to make a call immediately
to the box office at The Carnegie in Covington to get a ticket for an
eye-popping local production.

Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and local businesses collaborate on a groundbreaking visual and musical experience

Over-the-Rhine and Washington Park are gearing up for LumenoCity, a musical and visual collaboration
that is the first of its kind in the world, featuring the Cincinnati
Symphony Orchestra and Music Hall itself.

In-the-moment, fast-talking producting loses some humor in the fury

Lauren Gunderson’s Toil and Trouble is a very new play inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The title page of her script calls it a “Scottish-ish” comedy. Know
Theatre of Cincinnati is giving the script just its second production.

Almost a century ago, British novelist
John Buchan wrote a potboiler about espionage and double-dealing. Twenty
years later in 1935, film director Alfred Hitchcock turned The 39 Steps
into a much-admired cinematic thriller.

Composer Philip Glass’ 18th opera, Galileo Galilei,
telescopes the conflict between genius and dogma in 10 scenes, moving
backward in time as Old Galileo looks back on his life. By opera
standards, it’s brief: 90 minutes without an intermission.